Debates about the quality of this sort of content aside, wow, that's just what we need, a generation of new adults who have no idea what's going on...
This is blatantly false. This was a single youtube channel's mistaken belief
It was incorrect. Restricted Mode is completely unrelated to the issue, and plenty of the videos that are doing just fine are not available if you have restricted mode on.
There's still no definitive answer IMO, but it might be that an analytics endpoint was blocked by ad blockers.
Note that the people affected by this problem say they are getting the same revenue, just view counts changed. That means their videos are getting the same number of not-adblocked views.
They are platforms too, and US-based too, and IIRC Patreon has already been caught at least twice engaging in censorship : against some right-wingers, and some porn.
(They are at least less able to manipulate speech through recommendations I guess...)
But I do keep thinking about the fact that the move to the right among young men, will probably pretty quickly reverse itself, if they keep going after media/video games/porn, etc.
Probably to wring a few bucks out as they circle the drain in the same fashion as every other old formerly prestigious brand name.